232 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
is beyond our power to affirm. But we have to note the fact that 
until about the fifteenth century no such tendency appeared. The 
intervening period was, in its relation to scientific procedure, a 
period of suppressed mental development. 
Bearing in mind then, that sound scientific methods are gradual 
developments, and that history affords witness to a check on the 
development of mind in this direction, let us now notice the actual 
position of Greek Thought in relation to Induction. In the loose 
sense of the term indicated by Lord Macaulay, the earliest Greek 
philosophers doubtless employed Induction. In the absence of 
written records detailing their procedure, we may be unfair to 
them in ascribing their conclusions to a narrower range of premiss 
than perhaps actually existed. But even with the scanty statements 
of Aristotle and Diogenes Laertius, we can see how the founders of 
the Ionic School must have compared a vast number of minute 
observations before they arrived at what they held to be the mate- 
rial ultimate dpyy of all things. In like manner Pythagoras, by 
a succession of observations on the mathematical characteristics of 
all that has bulk, and an analysis of all bodies into surfaces, 
surfaces into lines, and lines into points, would, by at least an 
imperfect Induction, arrive at the conclusion that the formal ultimate 
of all things was Number, of which one was the essence. It was 
also by a succession of observations, more or less wide, on the 
resolvability of matter into extremely minute particles; on the 
presence, after all resolutions had been made, of a final inde- 
structible element; and on the action everywhere and in every 
thing of a mysterious Power, that Leucippus, and his disciple 
Democritus, made the ascent to their general law of ultimate atom 
76 tAnpés, and one force dvayxyn. In the Dialectic of Socrates we have 
a remarkable instance in practice, of the skill with which he could 
cause his hearers to pass from one particular to another, eliminating 
step by step what was accidental and personal, till the rational 
truth remained, clear and imperishable. We must ascribe it to the 
strongly synthetic character of Plato’s mind, and his perpetual 
insistance on a direct intuition of the eternal Forms or Ideas, that 
he gave no attention to the formulation of the initial Induction, 
which on the practical side of his Dialectic found such inimitable 
expression in his Dialogues. It is, however, an instructive fact, 
suggestive of the immense difficulties encountered by the human 
mind in its earliest endeavours to translate the realities of the 
